A Word from George Eliot

A bit of old business I’ve been meaning to get to for several days. This question of religion and the focus of its public rhetoric and exhortation on a narrow view of sexual morality with a comparable neglect of social justice – of, if you prefer, poverty, oppression, exploitation, bad working conditions, injustice, and the like. One of our readers took issue with that view of the matter, and I thought I would offer one or two more places where I’d seen the idea discussed.

The Islamic position on life on earth was that Muslims should enjoy the good things of life within limits prescribed by Sharia…What is worrisome about such calculations is that promises of reward in the hereafter can be used to stifle protest and demands for justice on earth. This suspicion is confirmed when we remember that the Islamists almost never champion the rights of the exploited and dispossessed and spend most of their time giving vent to anger against the imagined liberation of women…Such fixation with moral chastity has meant that sprawling multitudes of hungry and neglected people, almost always the vast majority of them being Muslims, can be found all over the Muslim world. You will seldom find any Islamist devoting his sermon to the alleviation of their privations. Some change in such orientation took place between the mid 1950s and early 1970s when ideas of Islamic social justice found reception in parts of the Muslim world, but such movements were superseded by Islamism after the Iranian Revolution. No wonder economic development has been slowed down in the Muslim world ever since Islamism began to influence the political agendas of Muslim societies.

Whether he’s right or not, the point is, it’s not only irritable Western atheists who think such things. And he says Hindus have the same problem:

As regards Hindu culture, while the upper castes were allowed to own property the Dalits were denied it and told instead to fulfil their duty (dharma) of serving their superiors quietly and passively so that in their next birth perhaps their karma (fate) will be a better one…Later, the Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj movements tried to bring about social reform. The Nehruvian state tried to change attitudes in a progressive manner. However, the rise of Hindutva changed the agenda once again: it accepted neo-liberal ideas in the economic sphere but in the social and cultural spheres conservative values were strengthened.

Martha Nussbaum has an interesting quotation in chapter 1 of Sex and Social Justice, ‘Women and Cultural Universals’ (page 30):

Or, as a young Bangladeshi wife said when local religious leaders threatened to break the legs of women who went to literacy classes conducted by a local NGO, ‘We do not listen to the mullahs any more. They did not give us even a quarter kilo of rice.’

Short and to the point. Not so much of the threatening and preventing education, thanks, especially if you can’t and won’t even help us not starve to death. Or to put it another way, what is it about the mullahs that makes them prefer to threaten women and stop them becoming literate rather than give them food? And whatever it is, why on earth would anyone want to be bossed around by it? Or consider it somehow a good (‘spiritual,’ pious, etc) thing? Since what it looks like is just sheer bastard-like cruelty, bullying, and exploitation; treating people like so many brooms and cooking pots, as insensate things to be used.

So the problem seems to be one that fundamentalist Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism have in common at the moment: that they’re way too concerned with crushing people (especially women and Dalits) and way too little concerned with consoling or comforting or helping them.

Now, for your amusement, consider this passage from George Eliot’s brilliant essay from the Westminster Review in 1855, ‘Evangelical Teaching: Dr Cumming’:

Of Dr Cumming personally we know absolutely nothing: our acquaintance with him is confined to a perusal of his works, our judgment of him is founded solely on the manner in which he has written himself down on his pages…For aught we know, he many not only have the gift of prophecy, but may bestow the profits of all his works to feed the poor, and be ready to give his own body to be burned with as much alacrity as he infers the everlasting burning of Roman-catholics and Puseyites. Out of the pulpit he may be a model of justice, truthfulness, and the love that thinketh no evil; but we are obliged to judge of his charity by the spirit we find in his sermons, and shall only be glad to learn that his practice is, in many respects, an amiable non sequitur from his teaching.

There. She was one hell of a phrase-maker, Maryann Evans was. If you haven’t read that essay, I do recommend it. And she’s talking about the same phenomenon I was the other day – and the one Mary McCarthy was talking about when she said that religion is good only for good people; it makes bad people even worse.

13 Responses to “A Word from George Eliot”

Ah, the good Dr. Cumming. I was skeptical at first about Eliot’s take on him, just on general principles, but then I slogged through his Lectures on Romanism. (700+ pages. Small type.) Hoo boy. Not quite as bad as doing eighteen years of the Bulwark in less than two days, but still pretty high on the pain scale. But proof, anyway, that one’s intellectual interests can be pretty irrational (because, let me tell you, there are far more pleasant ways to spend one’s time than reading Victorian anti-Catholic propaganda.)

I was hoping you’d comment, Miriam – but hadn’t dared to hope or even imagine that you would have read the man himself! Now that’s what I call empirical research, checking up, etc. I’m seriously impressed! 700 pages of small type of Victorian anti-Catholic ranting excuse me propaganda – well done. I believe you about the more plesant ways. I wonder if you and Eliot are the only people ever to have read that book. No, probably not. All those Victorian evangelicals, with no tv or radio to compete, no doubt put their shoulders to the wheel…

A variation of this selective sight you write of is just what initiated my rejection of Catholicism many years ago. Every Tuesday was “Mission Day” in my Catholic grade school; classes competed to see which would collect the most money for the Church. One day my dad drove us by a small outdoor shrine that was being converted into a grand place of worship, complete with statues and gold-plated flower stands. “Who pays for that?” I asked my dad. “We do, honey, when we give money to the Church.” This is what the Church spends money on? When homeless folks are living on the streets surrounding the shrine? I never competed again.

Interesting, Amy. And it’s an argument that’s been going on within Catholicism for centuries, if I’m not mistaken – between the humble types, the St Francis types, the imitatio Christi types, and the people who think the gold plate etc. simply redounds to the greater glory of The Church and so of the deity. But when there are homeless people juxtaposed to the opulent shrine, one would think it would be hard to choose the opulent shrine…

There is a secular version of it too – I can go to London and see spectacular museums, funded at least partially by the taxpayers. Just a few streets away, there are homeless people and beggars. We choose to fund the gold plates and similar marvels of the British Museum with money that could go to feed the hungry. This too is a deliberate choice (and hopefully a hard one to make).

Not the same thing though. Just for one thing, the beggars and homeless people can go to the spectacular museums. That’s what they’re there for – for the people. Not quite the same thing with the church – unless one thinks of it all as a large museum display, which is a little implausible.

Having worked as a contractor in a few banks in the City of London, I have been exposed to some incredible, almost breathtaking, works of art, as part of some banks’ private collections, hanging up on open-plan office walls. There is one bank that was most notable, because the lobby for one of its buildings housed many large sculptures as well as *HUGE* murals. And the saying goes, you can tell a company is in trouble when it starts to sell its art collection.

Flash forward to a trip I made to the Vatican. It’s when it hit me…St. Peter’s is the ultimate corporate lobby…The Roman Catholic Church is not a church; it’s an old, successful corporation. And the art and the real estate are how it retains some of its wealth. If it used more of its income for helping the poor and the downtrodden, or God forbid, sells some of its real estate and works of art, it would be in trouble. (And yes, I know this is a simplification of the point…)

OB: It’s not quite the same thing, but I do think that it’s quite close. The beggars and the homeless can go to the museum or the cathedral (as long as both are free and they don’t get ejected by the security) but neither are giving them what they really need – a meal and a warm safe place to sleep.

The cathedral is also seen as a place for the people [or at least those who worship there] by those who run it. It’s possible that neither the museum director nor the archbishop have actually *asked* the people what they want – they have just given them what they think they should have (a reflection of heaven on earth or an exhibition on 18th century depictions of Venice, for instance).

I might feel that one or the other is more useful, but each is justified inside its own belief system.

Sorry didn’t add my comment to the above. I was going to say… My daughter on a recent trip to London wandered in to the neo classiacl church in Covent Garden. She is a new christian but went in to look at the Architecture. It was empty accept for a homeless person asleep in the pews. They is also a christian cafe in Covent Garden where food was available. My own anglican church runs an Emmaus project helping the homeless in Bristol and the main homeless shelter here is run by the Salvation Army. I agree the church doesnt go in much for the overthrow of capitalism etc. but I think it is wrong to say it does not offer “a meal and a warm safe place to sleep”

But I didn’t say that. At least I can’t find any place where I said it – and I don’t think I did, because it doesn’t sound (to me) like something I would say – like my vocabulary. Are you sure I’m the one who said it?